


Halo: Uprising

by Legume_Shadow



Series: Halo: Section Zero Archives [1]
Category: Halo
Genre: Alternate Universe, Author Likes to Write Weird Stuff, Gen, Short Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-11
Updated: 2010-07-11
Packaged: 2017-12-28 06:08:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/988622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Legume_Shadow/pseuds/Legume_Shadow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In 2529, Spartan Blue Team is sent to Eridanus-II to capture and bring back to UNSC hands, the planet's two highest-ranking rebel leaders in an effort to quell the insurgency and unite Humanity against the Covenant threat.  However, there are more to these two leaders than Blue Team could ever realize.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Era: Halo Trilogy, Halo ODST, Halo: Fall of Reach (first edition), Halo: First Strike, Halo: Ghosts of Onyx universe. Does not incorporate most of Halo: Reach (except for tech) or anything in the Halo 4 and Forerunner expansion mythos.
> 
> First Publishing: July 2010. All copyrights apply to the appropriate parties and no profit is being made from this fanwork.

**Prologue**

0234 hours, January 17, 2518 (Military Calendar) \ New Novosibirsk, Eridanus II, Eridanus System.

 

“I’m sorry,” the doctor said, slowly drawing down the mouth covering as a middle-aged woman with brown hair and red-rimmed eyes broke down and collapsed against her husband. Her sobs were muffled as she turned her head into the man’s shoulder, and even then, her husband could also not contain his sorrow as he too silently cried.

Husband and wife held onto each other like a life raft in the middle of a stormy sea as the surgeon kept his head bowed, remaining silent as the family grieved. The neighbors of the husband and wife, the Parisas, stood a bit away before they approached and gave their friends hugs of comfort. Their little daughter was looking slightly confused, but remained silent, understanding that something significant had just happened.

After a few minutes, the husband let go of his wife and wiped the tears from his eyes with the back of his hand, asking the surgeon, “C-can we see him?”

The surgeon silently nodded and extended a hand for them to follow him. Teary-eyed husband and wife followed the surgeon deeper into the medical facility, grieving for the loss of their only son.

“Mommy, what happened? Why’s everyone crying? Is Johnny all right?” the little daughter of the Parisas, asked, tugging her mother’s skirt.

Her mother hastily wiped away her tears and knelt down, taking the little girl’s hands into her own and said, “Sweetie…John passed away…he’s not—do you understand what ‘passed away’ means?”

“Like grandpa not coming back ever again?” the little girl asked, sniffling a bit.

“Yes,” her mother said, taking her daughter into her arms as the little girl broke down and started to cry.

“But he said he’d marry me and protect me, mommy,” she said in between sobs. “He promised…”

 

* * *

 

0234 hours, January 17, 2518 (Military Calendar) \ Reach, Epsilon Eridani System.

 

“You ever wonder what’s up there?” John asked, eyes searching the clear night skies. There was nothing in particular he was looking for, but somehow, tonight, he just wanted to look at every star in the sky.

“Like what?” Kelly asked.

“Maybe someone up there is wondering what it’s like here.”

“I guess. Do you think we’ll ever meet them?”

“I hope so. Don’t you?” he asked. When training was done, John wanted to travel to all the stars he could see right now. He turned slightly to Kelly and saw her shrug. Turning back he stared at the glittering skies, until he heard a very faint shout off in the distance. It sounded like Chief Mendez.

“Time to go,” Kelly said, rolling up from the grass as she offered a hand to help John up.

He accepted and got up. Break time was over for now, and his training was not yet done. Perhaps one day, he would be up there, meeting those who wondered what it was like here on Reach, his home.

 

~*~*~*~


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 1**

1930 hours, March 25, 2529 (Military Calendar) \ Camp Gusev, Eridanus II, Eridanus System.

 

Dusk was quickly giving away to night as the colorful skies of Eridanus II slowly darkened with each passing moment. It was two hours before moonrise. The squawk of nighttime creatures was still at a minimum, but was still ample enough to cover the near-silent movements of four armored people. The luminescent green of the MJOLNIR armor blended with the strange iridescent foliage that threatened to encroach on this particular swath of the encampment.

The area had a distinct, heavy smell of defoliant, but that was filtered from each breath Spartan Blue Team took as they quietly and quickly approached the edge of the iridescent forest.

The first set of fifteen-meter high steel inter-linked gates that encircled the entire perimeter of the camp was void of any cover and was guarded by several hounds. The hounds looked ferocious and were separated every fifty meters. The creatures paced around the area occasionally growling at each other, but had not picked up on the scent of the Spartans yet.

John winked one amber light and two colorless projectiles were thrown from dense foliage right towards the hounds. The projectiles bounced and landed inside two of the caged areas and through infrared, John saw the scent-masking grenades do their work. The grenades would last only thirty seconds, but the hounds would not be able to properly smell or see anything for at least two days, which was more than the time Blue Team needed to get in, grab their targets, and get out of this compound.

He gave the go signal. The Spartans sprinted from the dense foliage, scaled the steel fence with barely any sound or movement, dropped lightly to the ground, and scattered in a pre-determined direction. John barely acknowledged that two guards in the high tower that over looked this particular area jerked and then slumped down without a sound as Linda’s suppressed sniper rifle did its work. He was more concerned with the guard that was idly standing beyond the next steel-linked fence laced with barbed wire.

Two steps before he reached the guard, a wink of green from Kelly signaled that she had successfully disabled the 50,000 volts of electricity that was running through the fence. John rammed his hands through the steel as if it weren’t there and wrapped his arm around the guard and wrenched it sideways. A faint _pop_ was heard as the guard’s neck snapped and the Sweet William cigar that the man was smoking fell to the ground.

He let go of the guard and scrambled over the fence. Though he could’ve continued to cut through the fence, it would’ve just wasted time and effort. As soon as he leapt and landed on the rocky ground in a crouch, he looked all around, seeing several thermal signatures inside the small houses and buildings that surrounded this place. There was one dark spot, and he dropped a marker for the rest of his team to get to. It was right on top of a sewer grate; the alternate route for their infiltration. He silently ran, keeping his profile as low as possible from the other watchtower guards and slipped into an alleyway that was empty of any thermal signatures.

Kelly was already waiting in the shadows by the time he got there. Seconds later, Linda dropped from a low roof while Fred arrived from another alleyway.

“They’ve got snipers with night vision starting to take their posts on several buildings, Lead,” Linda whispered over TEAMCOM.

“Is it me, or are there a lot more civilians around here than usual?” Fred asked.

“Looks more like a maximum security prison than a military camp…except with children,” Kelly said. “Beacons indicate that our targets are on the west and east sides of this place.”

John gave a curt nod. The beacons had been planted by a now-deceased ONI agent that had successfully infiltrated the place, until the agent had disappeared off the grid and had been found by the local authority days later, dead in Lake Gusev. Despite the setback, the beacons had remained in place and the UNSC had authorized a go for the operation to capture the two high profiled rebel leaders.

The catch was that these two leaders were not even military, though the compound and they were surrounded by planetary militia. According to the UNSC, these two had a lot of political clout though, and were convincing many rebel factions to not take the Covenant threat and the destruction of Bliss and Harvest seriously. The UNSC needed the two leaders captured.

“Underground then,” John said, quietly lifting the sewer grate up as the rest of his team acknowledged and jumped below. He jumped in after them and secured the grate. Kelly was already hacking through the gate that stood in their way with her datapad.

“Blueprints show that the sewers do lead to the hangar,” Fred said.

“Good,” John replied, “That’s our escape route.” He pulled up the same blueprints that Fred had looked at and quickly consulted it. It looked like a particular pipe led to the forest they had just emerged from. “If things go to hell, fall back along this route.”

“I’m in,” Kelly said, yanking the datapad out. “All gates have now been overridden. Security cameras looped.”

“Three and Two, secure Target B,” John ordered.

“Will do, Lead,” Fred acknowledged, as he and Kelly hurried away through the open sewer gate, towards the east side of the camp.

“Let’s move,” he indicated to Linda as the two of them headed in the opposite direction.

He took the lead for a while, consulting both the blueprints and the beacon marker until they hit a dead end and could go no more. John snaked an ocular camera up the grate they had paused beneath and saw no one. As quietly as he could, he removed the grate and lifted himself out of the sewers. Taking a few steps forward, he kept his rifle in front of him, covering Linda’s ascent. She stuck the grate back into its housing and tapped him on the shoulder, indicating that she was ready.

According to the blueprints, this particular dead end was a storehouse that was within the particular building that their target was located on. The door to this particular room was closed and there was light spilling in from the crack on the bottom, but John’s thermal indicated that no one was beyond the door.

He and Linda quickly but silently wove around the interior of the place, with all rooms and hallways that they encountered so far bearing empty signs. That worried him a bit, but he pushed it aside. As they closed in on their target, he suddenly heard a slight sound that came from his right and held up a fist.

Linda melted into the shadows of another room while John slipped into a darkened alcove, rifle ready. The door in which they were about to enter through to their right suddenly opened and spilled light, along with a loud, booming voice into the corridors. Silhouetted against the light was a person who was mumbling to himself, saying, “…from the Minister’s office…so much to do…so little time…”

John froze as the person descended and breezed right past where he was hiding, completely oblivious and continued down the corridor. As soon as he was sure the person had left, he poked his head out and saw into the chamber that still issued the booming voice. Crowds of people were gathered below the speaker, some chanting with him, some just listening to the speaker in a strange state of bliss.

Said speaker on the platform was their target.

“Fall back,” he whispered to Linda over a private frequency.

The two of them melted back into the maze of corridors. They had to find another way to capture their target. The crowd in there looked mainly civilian, and the speaker was in a too public place for them to capture right now. They would have to wait.

John was also slightly disturbed; most of those in attendance in that chamber looked very young, and he recalled Kelly’s remark about there being more children than usual in this compound. What exactly was this place?

He shook his head slightly in his helmet and stowed the thoughts to the back of his mind as he brought the blueprints back up. Of all the small rooms that he and Linda had peeked in so far, everything looked quite ordinary and sparse – only a sleeping pallet and wash bin in each. Nothing stood out from the ordinary except for the fact that instead of mainly adults, children were in this place.

He could still hear the mutterings of the person and made a quick gesture to Linda. She nodded once and melted into the shadows as he quietly followed the person’s voice, remembering that the person had muttered something about a ‘Minister’. ONI had not provided Blue Team any details on any other titles that the targets carried, but he wouldn’t put it past that the ‘Minister’ was the target that was current addressing the children in the chamber.

Luck was with him as he ducked into a corridor as soon as he found the muttering person standing in front of a door with a keypad attached to it. Linda winked a light over his HUD, indicating that she had a good view of the keypad. John carefully watched as the person quickly typed in the numerical digits and the door clicked open. He only had a glimpse of the chamber, but it told him all that he wanted to know. It looked to be the office of an officious leader, and the way that their target had been dressed most certainly fit the description.

He winked double amber to Linda and melted further back into the shadows of another corridor. Minutes later, the pitter-patter of the person’s feet carried down the corridors and back to the enormous chamber. Linda slipped out of the shadows of an adjacent corridor, just as John melted out of his. Linda quickly punched in the numerical code and he heard the lock click open. The door was too thick for him to get a thermal reading, but he pushed the door open, holding his rifle up and ready.

A large, polished oak desk greeted his vision as he pushed into the room. Decorating the sides of the office was several bookshelves lined with several ancient volumes and datapads full of information. Beyond the large, grandiose chair that was behind the desk was a corridor that most likely led to a wash chamber and possibly a bed room, according to the blueprints.

He gestured for Linda to sweep down the corridor to make sure that no one was in the rooms. Moments later, she winked the all-clear signal.

John did not want to linger here, but with no other way to corner their target without alerting the camp, their best bet was to stay here and wait in ambush. The likelihood that their target was going to come back here after whatever was happening in the chamber was fifty-fifty, but it was better odds than trying to openly capture their target in front of civilians and guards. He closed the door and waited.

 

~*~*~*~


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 2**

1936 hours, March 25, 2529 (Military Calendar) \ Camp Gusev, Eridanus II, Eridanus System.

 

The smell of burning firewood almost masked the foul-smelling odor that swirled around the sewers as Fred and Kelly finally stopped trudging through the shin-deep muck and quietly climbed out of a cleared grate and flattened themselves out against the corner of a dark alleyway. With night vision activated and enhanced by infrared, he saw three people in the building ahead, all on the first floor. One of the three was their target. All looked to be sitting in a room. Two more were standing on the outer edges of the building, most likely guards. One sentry was on the roof, walking this way and that, eyes scanning the distance, occasionally looking down towards the areas where the outer guards were.

Fred carefully watched the pattern of the rooftop sentries on the other buildings for a few seconds before making a few hand gestures to Kelly, indicating what the plan was. She winked an acknowledgement light, ready to go.

Securing his rifle onto his back, he unsheathed his combat blade from his shoulder casing and gave the go signal. Kelly sprang and darted off to neutralize the two guards in the front while he quickly climbed the building and reached the rooftop in less than two seconds.

The sentry hadn’t even heard him as he swiftly approached and plunged the blade into the man’s side, between the spaces in which the body armor did not protect. The sentry gurgled a bit before going completely limp and dead, but Fred made the sentry kneel, looking as if the sentry was just checking something. Sheathing the combat blade, he slipped back into the shadows and jumped from the roof, landing in a silent crouch, just as Kelly winked the clear signal.

Dashing to the front, he caught a glimpse of Kelly entering and followed while unclipping his rifle from his back. However, when he finally entered the room where the three remaining people in the building were, what he saw stopped him in his tracks, just as it did Kelly.

Two young children, looking no more than eight or nine years of age were standing protectively in front of a middle-aged woman, who had a steely look in her eyes.

Kelly had her rifle pointed at the woman, but Fred sensed her hesitation about the children. None of them made a noise, but all three were glaring at the two of them. For a second neither groups moved, then the woman gave an irritated sigh, but maintained her harsh glare.

“I knew this day would come,” the woman said, clutching a small picture frame to herself. “I just didn’t think it would be this soon.” She paused for a bit before placing her hands on the children, saying, “You can take me, but do not harm the children, or help me God, I swear I will find a way to kill both of you.”

The woman then pushed the children slightly away, saying, “I have a key in the top left corner drawer of my desk that will lock the closet in the hallway. I know that you will not let the children leave here but please, I ask that you just lock the two of them in there. Leave them be and I will go quietly with you.”

“Fred?” Kelly whispered over a private channel to him, voice thick with tension and hesitation.

“The kids are going to scream, no matter what,” he replied. “Put them into a long sleep. I’ll take the target.”

There was a millisecond of a slight uncertainty from Kelly before she winked her acknowledgement light and sprang like a lightning-fast cat. Even before she tackled and successfully knocked out the children, Fred was already lunging towards the woman. Just as the children thudded to the floor, unconscious, he wrapped an arm around the woman and covered her mouth with his other hand, holding her until she slumped to unconsciousness. The picture that the woman had been holding slipped from her hands and almost shattered to the floor, had it not been for Kelly’s quick reflexes that caught the photo before it hit the ground.

“Why does this picture look familiar?” Kelly absentmindedly whispered as she placed the photo on the desk while Fred scooped up the unconscious woman.

Fred took a glance at the photo and had to agree with Kelly’s puzzling statement. There were Blue Team’s two targets in the picture, happily smiling, with their arms around a young boy. It was not the targets that had him slightly perplexed – it was the boy in the picture with tousled brown hair and a slightly familiar-looking face, though he didn’t know where in his memories he found the face familiar at all.

He pushed the feeling aside and placed the woman on a chair before pulling open the top left drawer of the desk. A key was there, just as the woman claimed and he took it. Giving a nod to Kelly, the two of them gingerly picked up the unconscious children and carried them to the closet in the hall. Placing both in the closet, Fred shut the door and locked it with the key. However, instead of tossing the key away, he merely placed it back in the drawer and closed it.

Picking the woman back up, he gave a nod to Kelly who took point. Over TEAMCOM, he whispered, “Two and Three have the first package. We’re on our way out.”

 

~*~*~*~


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter 3**

1937 hours, March 25, 2529 (Military Calendar) \ Camp Gusev, Eridanus II, Eridanus System.

 

As soon as John heard the faint beeps of the numeric code being punched into the keypad, he readied his rifle and silently melted back into the long shadows in the hall directly behind the chair. Of course, he already knew that the so-called Minister was already at the door, having been alerted by Linda, who had climbed into the rafters of the building and silently laid in wait, watching the movement of the people below. The enormous door opened and he saw Blue Team’s second target walk in with a few books in his hand.

As soon as the door closed, he patiently waited until the salt-and-pepper haired man had settled into the enormous desk chair. That’s when John swiftly but silently approached and clubbed the man out cold with the butt of his rifle. With their second target slumped onto the desk, he whispered over a direct COM line to Linda, “Target out cold. Crowd status?”

“Guards are almost all dispersed. Civilians are milling around, but some are saying that it’s evening meal time and are headed out. Others are in their personal quarters,” Linda replied.

“How many are headed out?”

“Estimate over seventy-five percent of the crowd in the chamber. Give it a minute and most of them should be clear.”

“Copy.”

Exactly a minute later, Linda winked the clear signal and John slapped the side of the oak desk, bringing up a hidden compartment. Had his suit’s sensors not told him that something odd was in the desk, he would’ve never had discovered a definite way to clear their path to get their target to the rendezvous point. Apparently, what was hidden in the oak desk was a mechanism that fed sleeping gas throughout the building.

John didn’t have to extrapolate far to guess what was happening in this particular section of the camp, especially with the sleeping gas. However angry he felt about it, he knew that he had to use the mechanism in order for them to escape back into the sewers without being spotted. At least they were removing the person who used it so often, so this would theoretically be the last time the children and others who lived in this particular building would be gassed.

He hit the button and immediately heard a faint, barely audible hissing sound issue from several tiny vent ports from the circulating air conditioning that ran through the building. Both him and Linda were already breathing through their suit’s air recycling system, so they were safe from the gas, but for the others in the building, they were not so lucky.

“All clear,” Linda whispered after a few moments.

John hefted the unconscious man and exited the office. Handing the man over to Linda, who had climbed down, he took point and the two of them with their package rapidly made their way back to the sewer grate they had emerged from. No one stopped them.

John splashed down into the muck first, clipping his rifle to his back before turning and took the man from Linda. She came down after and silently closed the grating. Handing their package back to her, he pulled out his rifle again and keyed TEAMCOM, saying, “Lead and Four have the second package. What’s your status, Three?”

“We’ve secured a transport in the south bay of the hangar,” Fred answered. “You can’t miss it – it’s the only Pelican they have here.”

“We’re on our way,” John replied as he and Linda hurried through the maze towards their destination. “ETA three minutes.”

“Copy.”

It puzzled him as to why there was a heavily armored military transport in this type of compound full of children, even though planetary militia were in this place. It seemed out of place, for he knew that most of the colonial planetary militia used different types of contractor transports, preferring not to use UNSC standard transports.

Roughly three minutes later, John and Linda arrived at their destination. Quickly snaking up the ocular camera, he saw that the immediate area’s coast was clear. With the tiny camera back in his armor’s small waist compartment, he climbed up and out of the grate. Linda handed him the still unconscious man before climbing out herself and he handed their package back to her.

He took a few crouched steps forward, past several vehicles that hid them from the general view of the open hangar and swept his eyes around the place. Aside from a few large rats that scurried about, there was no one that he could visually see. No contacts were pulsing on his radar either. The Pelican was a few hundred meters on the south side of the bay and its belly was open, though John saw no movement from what he could see of the belly.

He turned back, gave a nod to Linda and both he and her silently made their way around the maze of vehicles in the hangar, keeping their profile as low as possible while keeping their ears and aural sensors boosted to maximum. He filtered out the nighttime noise from his aural sensors.

They made it to the belly without incident and he winked a double green to alert Fred and Kelly that he and Linda were approaching. As soon as John stepped through the threshold and up the ramp, he saw the other two Blue Team members slip out of the shadows.

As Linda set down the unconscious man across the bench on the port side of Pelican’s benches while Fred carried the unconscious woman in from the cockpit. Kelly headed back to the cockpit and with a hiss, the belly closed and the whine of the engines starting up was heard. Moments later, the transport shook as Fred and Linda sat on the starboard side.

John stood and went to the cockpit, standing behind the pilot’s chair as Kelly accelerated out of the open bay and into the open night skies. Behind them, the encampment looked like any other typical flattened and settled ground, though the Pelican’s open COM was starting to squawk.

No matter, they were already at full burn, and their PZ was in a remote location in space; planetary authorities wouldn’t be able to catch them in time. Kelly turned the COM off and settled in. Another mission against the rebels accomplished.

 

~*~*~*~


	5. Chapter 5

**Epilogue**

1058 hours, March 30, 2529 (Military Calendar) \ CASTLE Base, Reach, Epsilon Eridani System.

 

Catherine Halsey irritatingly sighed as she downed her third cup of coffee in the past three hours. Damn the climate and the lack of decent fields to grow proper coffee beans. Paraphernalia covered her desk, but her datapad was sitting in front of her, along with several laptops that surrounded her. A ping sounded from her prototype intrusion software she was currently testing, secretly, and she looked at the file that popped up.

She frowned and placed the coffee cup down on the desk and peered a bit closer, rereading the lines she had just scanned. Strange that this particular mission, even if it was a classified Spartan one, was covered in a lot more black ink than what she normally encountered when fishing for information on what her Spartans were doing.

Opening the file, she glanced at the contents before quickly typing in a few commands to let her prototype intrusion software dig and erase through several layers of the black ink. However, as she scanned the report in detail, she stopped reading in the middle as two names caught her attention.

“No,” she murmured, rereading the particular line again before reading a bit further into the report.

Five days ago, Spartan Blue Team had been sent to Eridanus II on a high priority mission to capture two Insurrectionist leaders based in Camp Gusev. The file listed the mission as success, but Catherine was disheartened. On another laptop screen, she brought up an old, classified report that was dated the 17th of January 2518 and glanced at it. Within the file was a certificate of death, along with the detailed medical reports on how the young patient had died. Said patient was a flash clone of one of the many children abducted into the SPARTAN-II Program.

The current Spartan mission report detailed that the parents of the particular flash clone post mortem file she had glanced at were not military leaders within the Insurrectionists. The husband and wife team were more politically and personally motivated by the premature death of their child. They had been stonewalled by the medical community to get answers about their deceased child, partially because of the implementation authorized by Catherine herself. She did not want any one of the parents of the seventy-five Spartan candidates to look too closely at the death of their child.

Disillusioned by the colonial government, they had joined a small rebel front, eventually making their way to the top of a very highly popular and successful rebel group that wielded a lot of political power within the Insurrectionists. It was because they had established a sort of camp for many of the colony’s children to be sent to in the summer to continue their education. In a way, Catherine found the establishment of said camp to be similar to the old child-indoctrination camps that ancient Earth history had, back when separate nations still existed.

In a way, she found it eerily similar to what she had put her Spartans through, though their childhood, though instead of a military indoctrination, the children at Camp Gusev had rebel indoctrination drilled into them. She read a bit further into the report. The news nets, even those biased against and for the UN and her colonial agreements, had sounded about some political fallout on Eridanus-II, but she had not paid too much attention; concentrating more on her projects and the greater threat – the Covenant.

Catherine sighed and closed all the files she had recently opened and stared at her coffee cup for a good long minute. The mission was successful; both leaders were now in ONI’s hands. Mission success meant that Spartan Blue Team got the job done with no incidents. However, she couldn’t help but wonder if John-117 knew that he had captured his own parents?

 

~FINI~


End file.
